Trapped
by L's Hope
Summary: Naruto has been trapped his whole life. Luckily, he's well on his way to escaping.


A/N: I was digging through my old stuff and I found this, discovered it wasn't as bad as I'd previously thought, and brushed it up. Ta-da!

Summery: Naruto has been trapped his whole life. But luckily he's well on his way to escaping.

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><p>He was trapped.<p>

Naruto had been trapped since the day of his birth, or, more accurately, the time the Kyuubi had been sealed into his stomach. Even when he was little he'd known it, although he hadn't know why. But the fact was Naruto was living in hell.

And he couldn't leave.

He had no family. Social services always became abruptly incompetent when it came to him, so he'd been living on his own for as long as he could remember, with the barest minimum of material possessions and scant income. His education was lacking, and it didn't take the brightest person in the village to realize his future was not all that bright; but Naruto didn't mind this so much. He would live.

It was the way people treated him that made him feel as though he'd been taken prisoner and was going to be subjected to torture for the rest of his days. Teachers scorned him. Peers looked down on him. The rest of the general populace did their best to pretend he didn't exist. And everywhere he went, he could feel glares on his back. He never saw anyone glaring, but he could always feel it, many eyes trying to burn a hole straight to his heart. Sometimes he feared they succeeded.

There was only one person he could honestly say cared about him, and he was the worst of them all.

The Third Hokage was kind and grandfatherly, and had the circumstances been different Naruto probably would have cherished his presence. But every time the Hokage visited, treated him to ramen, or just greeted him on the street, all the unseen glares on Naruto's back shifted into adoring gazes directed at the village leader. They looked at him like he was the savior of all mankind. Like they would gladly do anything in order to please him. And the Hokage just smiled his grandfatherly smile as he flaunted this treasure in front of the most unloved person in the village. It made Naruto sick.

Even the conversations they had together made the boy grit his teeth. The old man was always asking pointless questions. _"How are you doing?" "Have you made any friends?" "Is everything going all right?"_

And when Naruto voiced his own questions; _"Who were my parents?" "Why is my apartment so rundown?" "Why does everyone hate me?"_ He always answered without answering at all. _"They were good people." "Apartments are costly." "They don't hate you, Naruto."_

One day Naruto had gathered up the courage to ask the Hokage a question that had been gnawing at his mind for weeks. "When will I be old enough to leave Konoha?"

The old man had looked perturbed, then said amicably "Shinobi can visit other places on missions."

Naruto had frowned, because he hadn't said anything about shinobi and if he left on a mission he would have to come back. "But when can I leave permanently?"

The Third's frown deepened and he replied "Why would you want to leave behind you're home?" in a voice that sounded custom made to guilt trip people.

Naruto couldn't find the guts to say "Because I hate your village and everyone in it," but a few weeks later he did find the guts to pack all of his food and clothing into an old knapsack and trot purposefully out the gates of Konoha.

He didn't get far.

Before he even reached the tree line, masked ninjas were all over him, dragging him back to the village. Looking back on the incident made him wonder if the Third was tracking him somehow. Every other time he tried to run away, no matter how clever his plan or how good his disguise was, the end result was always the same. He'd be brought back to the village, and the Third would look at him with deeply hurt eyes that asked him _'why?' _Then he would be lectured on how dangerous it was to leave, and be punished with no ramen for a month. Sometimes his weekly stipend would even be cut. A month after his first attempt at running away, Naruto received an early birthday present from the Hokage.

A bright orange jumpsuit, with a note pinned to it that wished him a happy birthday and told him to wear it.

Naruto scowled.

He'd never go unnoticed in a thing like this.

In the end he gave up trying to run away. He'd reached the conclusion that at this point there was only one way to leave the godforsaken village. He didn't have anything even remotely sharp inside his house, due to the caring actions of the Third Hokage, but he did have one thing that would accomplish his purpose. A large box of rat poison.

And so Naruto happily dumped the whole box into his homemade ramen, and proceeded to devour it in hopes of ending his own life. Not a minute after he finished, the world began to spin and his face met the floor. Naruto smiled as darkness closed in around him.

To his eternal dismay, he awoke almost a week later to a too bright room and a killer headache. The Third Hokage was staring down at him worriedly, and Naruto realized he was in a hospital bed.

"You've been gravely ill," the old man told him. "It's lucky your immune system is so adept."

Lucky. Naruto didn't think so.

As soon as he left the hospital, Naruto scoured the village in search of something sharp. He finally found a pack of abandoned kunia in the forest training grounds. Technically this part of Konoha was off limits to civilians, but Naruto just figured it was because the shinobi were selfish assholes who wanted the great outdoors all to themselves.

He gleefully grabbed the nearest weapon, and with little ado shoved it into his chest. The agony was horrible, and this time the world didn't blur but instead came into painful focus. He dropped to the ground and curled in on himself like a dying insect, hissing as it pushed the kunia deeper into the wound. Suddenly, he felt a burning sensation along his stomach, and the kunia slid back out of his chest. To his extreme horror, the wound started to sizzle and close up again, until all that was left was a small pink scar.

Naruto had never cried so much in his life.

On his next shopping trip, the boy snagged as many pill bottles as he could reach. The lady at the shopping counter squinted at him suspiciously, but merely overcharged all his purchases before letting him pass. When he reached his dingy apartment, he ignored all the other groceries and took a handful of each medication he possessed.

An hour later, he was kneeled over the toilet, puking his guts out and hallucinating about dancing food products and cackling old men.

A day later, he was incredibly unhappy but not unhealthy in the least.

Drowning didn't work. Falling from five story buildings didn't work. Starving himself didn't work. Once he had even tried hanging himself. After half an hour he'd become comatose, but when the rope finally snapped a few weeks later he'd awoken good as new, albeit very thirsty. He'd almost given up hope until the old man came to him on his sixth birthday with an offer.

The Third Hokage was blissfully ignorant of Naruto's attempted suicides, and merely thought the boy was antisocial and accident prone. So he didn't realize that Naruto would see the offer he was making as a one way ticket towards his only life goal.

"Would you like to become a shinobi?"

It was perfect, because being a ninja was the most dangerous profession Naruto knew of. If he was a ninja, then other ninja would be trying to kill him at all times. The boy had no doubt that at least one ninja out there would be able to beat his little immortality trick. Naruto accepted immediately, saying he couldn't wait to start going on missions.

But in the meantime, he would keep trying to do himself in.

Anything to escape this place.

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><p>AN: For a one-shot, I'm actually pretty proud of this piece. The reason it has laid around in my unused documents so long is that after I finished I decided to add more on to it, using my ideas for a different fanfic. Unfortunately, while the ideas matched up, the writing styles didn't mesh very well, so I was left bemoaning the fact I would have to rewrite this whole thing. And then I did what I do best; procrastinate. A year later, I stumbled on this piece, decided I didn't have the heart to change it and that it could stand damn well on its own, and published it here. I hope you enjoyed.


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